The Nightmare This Time

A nuclear showdown with Iran could be this generation's Cuban missile crisis. Here are the reasons we must not let it come to that.
By Graham Allison | March 12, 2006

ACCORDING TO A RECENT Gallup poll, most Americans now view Iran as our country's greatest national enemy. Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News survey reports that 42 percent of Americans support a military strike to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology. Online betting sites make the odds of a US or Israeli airstrike against Iran before March 2007 as 1 in 3.

As Senator John McCain has summed up the hard-line position, ''There is only one thing worse than the US exercising a military option, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran."

On the other hand, some commentators, even in the administration, now suggest that a nuclear-armed Iran is inevitable. ''Look, the Pakistanis and the North Koreans got the bomb," a ''senior official" told The New York Times, ''and they didn't have Iran's money or engineering expertise."

As citizens, we are watching a slow-mo Cuban missile crisis in which events are moving, seemingly inexorably, toward a crossroads at which President Bush will have to decide between McCain's options. Before we get there, however, Americans should vigorously debate the bottom-line question: Can we live with a nuclear Iran?

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